Biophysical Society Bulletin | October 2018

AMessage from the President

Biophysicist in Profile

Officers President Angela Gronenborn President-Elect David Piston Past-President Lukas Tamm Secretary Frances Separovic Treasurer Kalina Hristova Council

AMessage from the President Next month, Americans will head to their polling places to cast their votes in the midterm elections. Many states will hold gubernatorial elections and overall, voters will decide which party controls Con- gress. The stakes are high. The current political environment has in many ways worked to undermine science — singling out climate science for particular ire — and cutting back on legal immigration to the United States, which hampers the free flow of scientific discourse and progress in research. Ad- ditionally, the White House proposed budget had recommended significant reductions in the science research budget. While it may seem like the deck is stacked against science, there are reasons for hope. The 2018 midterm elections have attracted strong interest from the scientific community and many members of our community have thrown their hat in the ring. Science has tracked at least 31 candi-

Jane Clarke Areas of Research Protein folding and protein- protein interactions

Institution Wolfson College, Cambridge

At-a-Glance

Zev Bryant Jane Clarke Linda Columbus Bertrand Garcia-Moreno Teresa Giraldez Ruben Gonzalez, Jr. Arthur Palmer Marina Ramirez-Alvarado Jennifer Ross David Stokes Joanna Swain Pernilla Wittung-Stafeshede Biophysical Journal Jane Dyson Editor-in-Chief Society Office Ro Kampman Executive Officer Newsletter Executive Editor Rosalba Kampman Managing Editor Beth Staehle Contributing Writers and Proofreaders Dorothy Chaconas Laura Phelan

Growing up in Cambridge, United Kingdom, Jane Clarke always planned to be a scientist and a teacher, and she achieved that goal, earning her degree and working as a high school teacher. After a move to the United States for her husband’s job, Clarke went back to school and began a second career as a researcher —which turned out to be a great success. After running her lab for 20 years, she now serves as president of Wolfson College.

Angela M. Gronenborn

Jane Clarke

dates — including BPS’s own former Congressional Fellow Randy Wadkins —who qualified for primary elections, with several advancing to the general elections in November. In our community, many of our BPS members are getting involved with our public affairs efforts. The Public Affairs Committee has redesigned our Advocacy Toolkit, strengthening several of our current programs and rolling out new initiatives. Our members are taking advantage of these efforts. This August, while the House of Representatives was out on recess, our members James Bashkin and Eric Majzoub of the Uni- versity of Missouri in St. Louis visited Senator Roy Blunt’s district office to discuss National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding and the importance of investments in fundamental research. In Washington, BPS staff worked with Kelsey Bettridge , a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, to set up a Hill Day and visited with Maryland’s Senators and Representative Elijah Cum- mings of Baltimore. These efforts are vitally important to sharing the positive impact our work as biophysicists has on society. Further, they help to provide Congress the cover it needs to counter budget cutbacks. For example, Senator Blunt serves as the Chairman of the spending panel that controls the NIH budget. In late August, the Senate passed a spending package that contained a $2 billion increase in funding for NIH, compared to FY 2018 levels. This is quite an accomplishment considering a majority of the Senate hails from the same party as the President, yet strongly rejected the Administration’s proposed budget for NIH. Instead, Sena- tors sent a resounding bipartisan message that Congress values investments in biomedical research. So, you may be wondering, how can you get involved and make a difference in the midterm elections? First, get out there and vote on November 6! Second, if you have not been to our website in a while, visit our Advocacy Toolkit. BPS staff is ready to work with you to develop opinion pieces or letters to the editor touting the benefits of biomedical research and help you host your local member of Congress for a lab tour. And, lastly, consider coming to Washington! Several BPS members just par- ticipated in the Rally for Medical Research, which brings the biomedical community to Congress. In the spring, BPS will also participate in STEM on the Hill, which brings together scientific societies, universities, and national laboratories to advocate for science. In closing, your voice matters. While current policies being followed are largely discouraging, we cannot influence the public policy process sitting at home. I strongly encourage you to support your colleagues running for office and get involved with BPS’s efforts. — Angela M. Gronenborn

Even as a young child, Jane Clarke , now Pres- ident of Wolfson College, Cambridge, knew she would grow up to be a scientist and a teacher. “I was always a scientist — surely all young children are!” she says. “That is, cu- rious and testing how the world about them works. I was encouraged by my parents to explore, ask questions, investigate, test every answer. My mother was a science teacher and although my father left school at 15 he was always mathematically and technically minded — he worked on radar during World War II.” She earned a bachelor’s degree in biochem- istry from York University and then followed in the footsteps of her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, becoming a high school teacher. After she had been teaching for many years, Clarke and her family moved to Atlanta, Georgia, for her husband’s work as a banker. She was not certified to teach in Georgia, so she decided to return to school to update her scientific knowledge. She enrolled at Georgia Tech, where she fell in love with research. “I did a course with the protein crystallog- rapher Bud Suddath (who sadly died shortly after I left the United States) and that was when I decided a career in research was for me. I knew I wanted to work on the ‘next step’ in the DNA-to-RNA-to-protein paradigm — that is, how a linear sequence could en- code the structure of the protein, the pathway by which the protein folds to that structure, and its biological function,” she shares. When

the family returned to the United Kingdom, Clarke, at the age of 40, joined the group of Alan Fersht at the University of Cambridge and completed a PhD in three years. “I joined Alan Fersht’s lab just after he had started using protein engineering to investigate protein folding … and essentially, I have never looked back,” she says. “That big question is still one of the most interesting questions in biophys- ics, as far as I am concerned.” Prior to starting with Fersht, she had been discouraged by another scientist, who told her that it was not possible to pursue a PhD and have a successful career in science while raising children. “Being older, I had the confi- dence to reject that misogyny — the supervi- sor in question would never have said that to a man,” she explains. “Turns out it was a great thing that he rejected me — Alan Fersht was doing far more interesting research and he nurtured my career. He never asked, ‘Why are you leaving at 4 PM?’ He only cared about what you achieved.” Following completion of her PhD, she won a training fellowship to do her postdoctoral research on biological NMR with Mark Bycroft in Fersht’s lab. In 1997, Clarke received a Wellcome Trust Fel- lowship, and has held a series of fellowships from the Trust since then. “These fellowships are marvelous — you are free to explore your questions, follow your nose, without teaching and administrative obligations, and you only have to write a grant proposal once every five

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Ray Wolfe Catie Curry

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